lace up your scars (let that be your armor)
by Landwerda
Summary: There is a story, in the ghostly streets of Stalingrad, of a princess without a crown. Natasha Romanoff has been many things in her life: dancer, monster, wife; she has remembered events that never happened, forgotten ones that have. But she has always loved one man, with green-glass eyes. Or: twenty years after she dies in a car crash, Natasha goes searching for her brother.


**Before you start reading, I suppose it's only fair that I tell you that the fairytale is of my own making, and the Anastasia thing really only makes sense in a historical perspective. So if you don't know your early-USSR history, there's one paragraph down there that won't make any sense. Other than that you should be fine.**

 **Also, this is set a little bit after my fic _Glowing._ Don't need to read that for this to make sense, but it might help. Especially when I start talking about _Zima Soldat,_ the Winter Soldier, or her parents. **

**Enjoy, then? I'm proud of this fic, even if it's a little… strange.**

* * *

Her mother is dead. She has killed her father with her own hands.

But the secret that is polished and hidden in the deepest folds of her mind isn't one of her fear or her cowardice or her rage.

* * *

 _There is a story, in the ghostly streets of Stalingrad, of a princess without a crown._

* * *

It is an old tale, Natalia knows, an old tale fit only for fishermen's wives and children, and she is neither of the two.

But she is desperate, and there is fear in a corner of her heart, and she is bleeding black blood onto the floor, and Clint Barton sees something inside of her, and, and, and.

* * *

 _They say she wails through the streets and steals a man's blood for his own, and when there is no blood to be taken she drinks their happiness._

* * *

Men have erased her mind and redrawn it into lines that please them. They have broken her into a tool and she gave in to them, until she fought once more, fought with desperation, fought and turned their perfect, honed weapon into a defective tool for their enemies.

Love is for children, but Natasha is the name of a child. In their hands she called herself Natalia and a woman, but Natasha, Natasha Romanoff is the name of a child and not a woman.

She remembers, in the barest shadows of her memory, a boy:

 _Ivan, king of the peasants, Ivan, the boy with green-glass eyes, Ivan, tall and lanky and slim, Ivan, her not-brother in all but knowledge_

And sometimes she remembers hot, heavy breath on her neck, and she is three, four, five, and he is curled against her collarbone-

Natalia killed her father with her own hands.

Natalia watched her mother die.

Natalia is a monster, and-

* * *

"I love you," she breathes in the darkness of the Red Room's night, thirteen and newly-come from her first mission. It is from a memory-that-isn't, curled in the hollows of her bones. Nightmares and new horrors fleck the insides of her skin, she wants something _old,_ and these come, and though she knows each word, objectively, together they just… they just _don't._

The words are strange and weighted on her tongue, but even if her mind doesn't remember her mouth does, and the syllables trip out of her mouth, heavy.

She thinks that this is what can kill her, this feeling inside of her chest, a warmth and a chill all at once. She thinks that if she wants to survive she needs to let this go.

She is thirteen, and all Natalia wants is to forget what _love_ feels like.

* * *

 _They say she screams scarlet tears and there was only ever one man who survived her dead-fish grasp._

* * *

"Tell me something true," Clint whispers into the gilded arch of her throat one night.

"I killed my father," she says.

"No," he murmurs. "Tell me something _true."_

* * *

 _The man had a child, the story goes, and a young wife, but the princess still wants him. He runs, they say, runs all the way up to the Volga where he balances between winter river and winter ghost._

* * *

"I think… I think I had a brother."

"I had one too."

* * *

 _"I shall give you anything," the man tells the princess, on his knees and begging._

* * *

Natasha leans across the doorway, across from Clint, and waits. They are both broken, though he is healing; she has pieced herself back together enough times to know that she will never _not_ feel as she feels, now. The liquid sheen of metal plays across his face, and she remembers:

Blood and screams, and the glitter of green glass eyes across the midnight of the Volga.

"I want to find my brother," she tells him.

He stills. "Tasha-"

"A month," she bargains. If nothing else, she knows the terror of ghosts and magic and monsters. A month, she says, long enough for the moon to go from dark to light to dark again. A month, she can work with.

A month is too long.

"A week," Clint returns.

She frowns. "Two."

"Deal."

The moon will shift, from full to new, and then she will know this last secret of her past. Natalya unbends her spine in celebration, and Clint watches her closely.

She sinks into a graceful plie, arms aloft, and then an arabesque. Ballet is meant to be delicate and ornate, each movement infinitely lithe. She is supposed to twirl and dance on the arch of her toes, to turn pain into pleasure into beauty.

She is not Natasha here. She is Natalia.

She is the woman who has killed and drowned in rivers of blood. She is allowed to be violent, here, to rip away the concealing alabaster skin and obsidian clothing, she is allowed to bare the red-red-red scars of her past, she is allowed to be a monster in front of Clint and he will not, she knows this as surely as she knows the color of blood and screams, he will not judge her.

Natalia turns to him, and smiles prettily and whispers, cold as the Volga on the winter solstice, "He will be dead."

Because that is what she _does,_ Natalia, she kills those she loves and murders those she hates and leaves behind her a trail of dripping, dripping red and ash.

And Clint- stupid, ugly, weak Clint- stands up and steps forward, wraps an arm around her shoulders and buries his other in her hair, and he will be burned, Natalia knows, burned and burned and burned until there's nothing left of him but lithium-red flame. But he doesn't say anything, just comes closer, and his touch anchors her for a brief moment, drags Natalia down and chains her to the ground, and when her feet hit earth she _turns,_ like the fallen angels of old, she turns and then Natalia turns to Natasha and her venom drips away, replaced by bitterness and grief.

"He still lives," Clint whispers into her hair. "You remember him, Tasha. He lives inside here."

His hand brushes over her temples, and she leans against him, lets him take her burden for a moment.

"Let's go."

* * *

 _The princess tangles a hand over her red lips and redder hair, and feels pity for the first time, and she says, "Give me your heart, glassmaker, and I will let you go."_

* * *

It takes some time for them to know if he exists; Natasha spends every moment pacing, a tigress just _barely_ leashed. She turns with military precision and ballet-grace, and doesn't even snap at Clint most of the time.

He, to his credit, doesn't comment.

Then the computer beeps, and they move as one, smooth and deadly as assassins in their prime.

"He's in Haiti right now," Clint says.

Natasha rolls her eyes but doesn't respond. He waits a beat before continuing: "He's part of the delegation to help with the earthquake disaster fund. Apparently… he volunteered."

To this she snorts, but she can't help wondering, either- in another, better world, would she be like this man? Would she build out of the ashes of disaster, would she have the compassion for that, or would she be as destructive as she is now?

Is evil bred in her bones or is it a choice?

No. It had been a choice, she knows this, because so many others did not make it through the academy. But she did, and it had been her choice, that there would be no hell she would allow herself through, that her Mother would always be at her back, that she would be no longer Natalya Alianovna Romanova but the Black Widow.

But a choice between death now and death tomorrow is not a choice. Not really, and all of SHIELD knows it. She has paid for that wisdom in blood and pain- but no tears, never tears, Widow's do not cry- and suffered for it.

"What is his name?" She asks.

Clint turns and grins, hard-edged. "Ivan Alianovich Romanov."

Natasha blinks, and the after-images of the screen burns through her retinas, right up until she thinks it will be painted on her skull. Her eyes meet Clint's, and she thinks that her brother's name is a good name, a proper one for a proper man.

* * *

"There is a glassmaker in Stalingrad," she chants, voice echoing the sing-song lilt of a lullaby. The memory is old, though it is not as old as the truth of _I love you,_ but it is still as much a part of her as snow, or blood, or anger.

Clint stills, listens to her beyond the door SHIELD has built to separate them. His fingers tap-tap a rhythm against the corrugated metal walls, and Natalia smiles a wolf's smile in a lion's skin.

"There is a glassmaker in Stalingrad," she chants, but it is not right, that is not how the story goes.

That is not where the tale begins; the story begins instead, on another night far away and long ago. It begins when a seventeen year old girl is murdered by heartless men in red coats for nothing but her blood and the potential for destruction. It begins when a man points at her and says, cold and sharp and ruthless, " _There is something more important than you."_

It begins when the girl dies, and from her death rises the ghost.

Natalia has thought her story begins with a spinning car and a screaming woman and fire, turning the midnight sky whiter than a man dried of blood. She has thought her story pauses and flows as a stopped-up creek, in fits and starts when she sleeps and wishes it to. She has thought it ends here, in a tidy room in the bosom of her master's sworn enemy, but that is not true.

Her story is this: her mother loved her father but asked too many questions, she loved _Zima Soldat_ but not enough to break him free, and she will see, for the first time, the sunrise tomorrow. Her story is written in rivers of blood, in the terror of innocents, in the arc of a curved blade.

"In Stalingrad there is a princess without a crown," Natalia recites, and now she feels the dead skin of Natalia Romanova dripping away, peeling the layers back to see the newly-whole Natasha Romanoff, a tool forged in her own furnace this time.

"A princess with hair the red of flame, and the skin of snow, and the eyes of purest glass," she says, and wraps an arm around her. There is a saying: truth is hardest found in a mirror.

Natalia smiles, and Natasha grins, and then Natalia dies as Anastasia did: fighting to her last breath, but graceful at the end.

It is a good death, Natasha thinks, running a hand over the smooth pad of her thumb. It is a good death, but it is a better death, the very best, for a princess.

* * *

 _And the man reaches down and plucks up the ring on his finger, and he looks at the glitter of green glass and when he breaks it in half he feels his heart break with it._

* * *

Ivan has a daughter, Natasha sees. Her brother has a daughter, and she looks nothing like her aunt.

Or maybe she does. Isn't that the _point,_ something scrapes along her throat, isn't that the point of this venture? Isn't this why she's trying and fighting for this one last scrap of knowledge, a thin morsel for a hungering, starving wolf?

A niece.

The basic characteristics are classically different; from a distance Natasha would never look like her. Lyubov is blonde and blue-eyed, tall and curvaceous and effortlessly elegant. She takes after her mother, seven years dead, not her father; the dark eyes and hair Natasha has fought to make her own will never plague her beautiful niece.

Lyubov means _faith,_ she realizes as she boards the plane to Haiti. Her brother has called his daughter faith and she hopes it means something more than just a kind sentiment.

And the curve of her cheek is all Natasha.

* * *

But hope, Natasha knows, can only feed a belly for a night and no longer.

Better it be food, or warmth, or that greatest of morsels: loyalty.

Another would call that faith, and let the whispers rise higher.

* * *

"Who killed that man?" A voice hisses into her ear, and Natasha burns with the flame of hatred.

"I thought it was Rachmaninov," she says, and gets a slap where it burns, across the hollow of her cheeks.

Natalia is thirteen, and she is two weeks recovered from her first kill, but she will never ever ever forget the fear in his eyes or dull emptiness. She doesn't bend to torture, she remembers after a moment though she lets tears pool in her eyes. A Black Widow is strong beyond comprehension.

Denying it isn't working; she'll have to switch it up.

"You think _I did?"_ She half-shrieks, half-cries. "You think I could _do_ something like that?"

Her mark had been tall and lanky, but she is still thirteen and hasn't yet hit a proper growth spurt. Natasha looks like a boy, thin ankles and slim body. She has killed Boris, but it wasn't with the butcher's knife in the heart.

It was with a garrote and a twist of her wrist, and no blood has touched her clothes. She might dream of Boris and his final, desperate breath, but it doesn't matter, not now, not here.

The strategy is an effective one. The man frowns, thinks it through, and she uses that moment to gather her breath and catalogue her injuries. The stiletto in her palm is not regulation but it calms her when she sleeps, slows her breaths when she sees Boris' eyes and feels his gasp. She'd held it, weighed lightly, and not dropped it even as she was tied up.

Years later she'll escape from the very same wooden shack, years later she'll run out to save a man she might just love, brainwashed by a damned god. Years later Natalia will be Natasha and she will think herself capable of loving, but for now she is _not._

Her skin prickles, and then she flips into motion. By the time she leaves there are scratches down her arm already healing; Natalia's knife slides into the man's jugular vein and she kills, for the second time, and blood is on her hands.

It will never wash away.

* * *

 _The glassmaker of Stalingrad walks home that night, to be held in the arms of his lovely wife and young daughter, and his heart mends under their beautiful hands._

* * *

She stands opposite a nondescript man, who has brown hair on the edge of auburn and eyes the exact shade of hers. Clint stands at her back, while Lyubov stands at his.

"You do not know me," she says, and the wind almost rips the words away from her. "But I was born over thirty years ago, to a man named Alian Romanov."

Her hands tremble, though she does not show it, and the heat of his gaze burns some ice-packed crevice inside of her.

"Who are you?" Her brother asks.

"When I was born my mother named me," Natasha says. She breathes, in and out, then one last time, and she says her first life aloud for the first time since her death: "Natalia Alianovna Romanova."

Ivan stills, and Natasha smiles, and the world is balanced on a knife's edge.

He says-

* * *

Sometimes there are no beautiful endings, sometimes there is no bow to wrap it up. Sometimes there are no beautiful tales or phoenixes or princesses. Sometimes there is only fear, and the desperation that allows one to rise above.

Natasha knows this, it is a truth blazed into her very being.

Men have made her a dancer, a killer, a tool. They have made her a wife and a monster and a princess, they have taken and taken and taken until there is nothing left to take of her that they have not given.

But that is not true. They have taken what she has offered, but they cannot take what they do not know exists.

So the truth of Natalia Alianovna Romanova and Natasha Romanoff and Natalie Rushman is this: there was a dead princess who loved a glassmaker in the old city of Stalingrad, they could not make her forget _Iloveyou_ because they could not make her forget her brother, and there is humanity in even the deadliest of weapons.

* * *

It does not matter, she realizes, what Ivan says. It does not matter, because for the first time, it is her reaching out of the darkness for the light, and not others giving it to her. Her brother can still break her apart as trained torture cannot, but at least it will be a clean break.

Those are the easiest to heal.

* * *

He says-

* * *

A princess does not die, she has heard.

A princess does not die, but heroes are immortal and Natasha is not a royal, not a hero, but she _is._

They could not make her forget the truth of _Iloveyou,_ and if that counts for nothing _fine,_ but it does.

So she is.

* * *

He says, "I remember you."

And Natalia rises from the dead and speaks, words that have lain dormant inside her bones for twenty years: "I love you."

* * *

 _The ghost-princess of Tsaritsyn ever has green glass for her eyes._

* * *

 **Notes: This little one-shot is a by-product of a long conversation with my wonderful beta:** ** _Eolas Eadrom._** **A couple years ago we were deconstructing the Disney movie** ** _Anastasia (_** **mostly by comparing it to historical fact, yes we are weird) and she wanted to watch a horror movie about Anastasia surviving death as a ghost.**

 **So when we watched AOU, Eolas said something along the lines of "OMG, Natasha should totally have a brother!" And then I went and said something like "YES!" And that ended up here, where I couldn't** ** _not_** **write this for her birthday.**

 **Stalingrad, before Soviet Russia, was called Tsaritsyn; today it is known as Volgograd. This story also jumps around in a couple places. It felt best to keep it as it came to my head and advance the story itself, if not the timeline. I might, or might not, depending on the response, write a companion. I don't know.**

 **Reviews inspire me!**

 **-Dialux**


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